Product description

This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the facade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable.

Author information

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2009, Alice Munro is the author of eleven collections of stories, most recently The View from Castle Rock, and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She has received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W.H. Smith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Beggar Maid. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives with her husband in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron in Canada.

Customer reviews

Short stories where women can recognize themselves with everyday fears and problems. How to grow up to a happy womanhood, how to find and keep partner, how to mend a relationship, how to fight wrinkles and signs of aging, how to live alone or with an uncertain partner just pretending life is stable and expected. Special literary effect are due to surprising twists, changes in plot and hierarchy of characters and finding story not finished but just remaining in suspense.

Review quote

"One of the most esteemed writers in the world... Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness - and joy - of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro... An outstanding showcase for Munro's scrupulous, humane, unnervingly perceptive vision" Guardian "Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise" -- Jane Smiley "The best short story writer alive... Munro can pack more into one of her stories - more subtlety, more grace, more tender twists of the human heart - than many novelists do in a lifetime's oeuvre" Independent "One of the world's best living short-story writers... To say that she has made the short story her own and reinvigorated it somehow falls short - she has reinvented it" Observer "Alice Munro! Now that's writing" -- Margaret Atwood

Editorial reviews

A rich selection of 28 compact and resonant stories (they're novels in miniature, more often than not) drawn from seven highly praised collections previously published by the Ontario writer. Munro has been called, with good reason, North America's Chekhov. Her rich elaborations of seemingly commonplace lives, in which she invariably locates the imaginative heart of lives her characters wished and meant to have lived, have grown in power and complexity over the years, to the point where the best stories in her 1994 volume, Open Secrets ("A Wilderness Station" and the magnificent "Carried Away" - surely one of the best stories of the last 50 years), have placed her in serious contention both for the Nobel Prize and for the designation of best living short-story writer (only William Trevor rivals her). Readers who don't know Munro's fiction should be directed toward such marvels as "Dance of the Happy Shades," "The Beggar Maid," and "The Moons of Jupiter." But none should be neglected. "Here," as Dryden said of Chaucer, "is God's plenty." The collection of the year. (Kirkus Reviews)